Savina Petkova considers how the celebrated cinematographer's tactile style owes a lot to its tight framing of her subjects.
Giacomo Abbruzzese’s narrative feature debut Disco Boy is an unconventional war film and it’s only fitting that it looks like one. There is the world of war in the Niger Delta, where Belarusian refugee Aleksei (an ever taciturn Franz Rogowski) is deployed as part of his service in the French Foreign Legion; and there is the otherworldliness of his mercenary past haunting him later, in Paris. That relationship between the mundane and fantasmatic is made palpable by Hélène Louvart’s cinematography, which won her the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at last year’s Berlinale. Active since the Nineties, Louvart has shot nearly 60 films, for the likes of Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders, Alice Rohrwacher and Eliza Hittman, with a singularly tactile touch.
Disco Boy (2023)
At the crux of Disco Boy lies a spectral doubling between protagonists Aleksei and Jomo (Morr Ndiaye), who meet on the battlefield in Nigeria. While the former fights for his own freedom by serving foreign forces, the latter is a revolutionary fighting for the survival of his people as oil-conglomerate conflicts escalate. They seem to have little in common, but their destinies are intertwined. To convey the plasticity of their ambivalent relationship, on either side of belonging, Louvart prefers to keep close and inhabit the silences through images.
When we first meet Aleksei, we are struck by how silent he is. A person with few words at his disposal – the French he knows he learned from films – and even less of a need, the young immigrant prefers to stray away from others. But the camera clings to him regardless, favouring close-ups over long shots. Instead of trying to capture what characters see (over-the-shoulder shots) or how they see it (point-of-view shots), Louvart frames both Aleksei and Jomo as sharply as possible even in close-up, while their surroundings are in a blurry soft focus. Simply put, the two faces of war are equally deserving of attention.
In accordance with Disco Boy’s thematic ambiguity, we’re constantly questioning who to side with. The recurring slow zooms over Rogowski’s face end up channelling that fickle empathy one can feel towards opaque characters. As she did for Rohrwacher on Happy as Lazzaro (2019), Louvart visually underscores the ambivalence of characters who are neither all good nor all bad. With this film, she holds close-ups to achieve the same effect. The slow, imperceptible zoom on the face is not a device to evoke eeriness or to guide the viewer into noticing a particular thing. On the contrary, the quiet contemplation, followed by a change in perspective to another body part or speaker, invites you in.
Louvart uses a similar approach when filming Disco Boy’s crowd scenes. A tight, packed way of framing can give a documentary-like feeling to a sequence, as seen when the interiors of a bus are rammed with Belarusian deserters masquerading as football fans. Men in the frame can be rowdy and spontaneous – or disciplined like the soldiers later in the film – but her camerawork allows for room to breathe. Thanks to Louvart’s dynamic of switching between facial close-ups and wide group shots, it feels even more special when only two characters share the frame.
Disco Boy (2023)
A dance sequence at the end of Disco Boy’s first act offers a visual answer to an irresolvable conflict between Jomo and his sister Udoka (Laetitia Ky): he wants to stay and fight, she wants to leave and live. To show this, Louvart arranges two cameras, one focusing on each of them on either side of a fire. Everything else is pitch-black, which makes it easy to see how they are both illuminated by the same blazing light, even when occupying different frames, a metaphor for their shared belonging. Louvart’s camera set-up remains static, but its proximity contains more yearning than observation. So, naturally, when the interactive part of the dance begins, and brother and sister align on the same side of the fire (and in the same frame), their lit-up bodies guide the viewer around the flames.
Disco Boy (2023)
Ambitious and enigmatic, Disco Boy unfolds like a spiral, expanding both horizontally and vertically between planes of existence, dreams and reality, life and death, France and Nigeria. Spirals are the most common movements performed by Louvart’s camera when introducing a character, be it Aleksei, Jomo or Udoka. With a combination of tracking shots and reverse tracks, the camera twirls around its characters, on dancefloors and battlefields alike, its presence intimate but never invasive. For example, a waterbound fight between Jomo and Aleksei is shot with a thermal handheld camera, the pronounced artificiality of the image giving it a surreal touch. One hears a stab, but never sees blood; red, in this case, is reserved for the warmth of a body and its vital insides. In this way, the marker of death also becomes clear in a mechanical way when the warmth completely drains out of the frame.
Disco Boy (2023)
What this fight scene shows is that across her work, and in Disco Boy in particular, Hélène Louvart can be economical and inventive at the same time, but it is her devout attention to framing and close-ups that defines her tactile style. Perhaps, every closer look invites love. Like in a medium close-up of a hand, a shot that lingers for slightly longer than one might expect, these extra two seconds turn quotidian images into poetry. As your gaze follows the shape of Rogowski’s wide palm, clasping his knee in a sturdy grip, somehow the image feels soft to the touch, with the perfectly calibrated light diffusing the harsh contours and resembling a painting. All of this can emerge and retreat in a beat – a flash and an eternity at once in the hands of Hélène Louvart.
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